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Too many international investors buying up all Toronto's property and skyrocketing prices. Why is they are allowed to come here and buy up everything but if we go to their countries the government limits us to 1 or 2 properties?
Thinking too highly of itself on a global scale. Not there yet. Maybe 100 more years of more history to develop then you probably woundnt have to argue how great it is. People will just get it.
3 minutes of Wikipedia is a best cure for ignorance and sometimes bigotry. You either made up your mind in denigrating Toronto because of the latter, or vastly overrate its competitors due to the former.
Too many international investors buying up all Toronto's property and skyrocketing prices. Why is they are allowed to come here and buy up everything but if we go to their countries the government limits us to 1 or 2 properties?
if you have the money, you are free to buy 1000 properties in London or New York. Some countries do have some controls over it, but more countries simply don't.
And complaining housing price is pretty lame considering Toronto unlike many other cities are aggressively increasing supply. The problem is, you want a DETACHED SINGLE FAMILY HOME, and guess what, it is not cheap in any good city (if it is available at all).
Here's a view from a foreigner who has lived here for 9 months. Before that, I lived in many other cities and countries around the globe.
Here's what's positive about Toronto and its inhabitants.
- Toronto is welcoming and non-racist. New immigrants are welcomed and cheered. There are no-signs of "us vs. them" as more than half of the Torontonians are born outside of Canada. Amazing! This is the first place in the world where we felt at home from day 1.
- Toronto is warm and sunny. The summers are long and warm, the winters short and light if compared to similar countries such as those in Scandinavia and Northern Europe.
- Prices are low. Condo's and houses are very cheap compared to cities that are only 1/5 of it's size and especially to other large cities. Don't compare CAD to USD/EUR or other currencies, just calculate. Here are a few examples for 1 bedrooms:
Toronto Entertainment district: 2000 CAD/400.000 CAD
London City: 5000CAD/1.400.000 CAD
Oslo Downtown: 3500CAD/700.000 CAD
Amsterdam Canal Circle: 4000 CAD/750.000 CAD
New York Midtown Manhattan: 5000 CAD/1.000.000 CAD
- Manual labour is cheap. Services like restaurants, cabs, delivery, banks and infrastructure have not transferred to e-services, which means there is a large demand and supply for manual labour.
Here's the only downside I've seen: people lack a sense of community, vision and big dreams. The startup scene is small, and many try to build companies that bring a little revenue now and a little revenue tomorrow. People try to improve their own lives, not the lives of the entire community and city. Dreams include having a house, not becoming a billionaire. These are all part of a common theme: the fear of automation.
Companies that require years before the first dollar comes in and millions in investments could never have been started in Toronto. Imagine Skype (Sweden/Estonia), Netflix (CA), Spotify (Stockholm), Rovio (Finland), Fiverr (Israel), Criteo (France). Each of these have raised more than 30M with little or no revenue, which is unthinkable for a company in Toronto. I've asked around for the best place in Toronto to raise a 1M seed round, and the answer is unanimous: Silicon Valley.
A side effect of this is lack of technology. There is no common communication between banks (instead, there is manual labor managing checks, bank drafts, even face-to-face mortgage negotiations!), there are phone numbers instead of answers on small companies web sites, cash is still used and sometimes even preferred. Government agencies use actual papers, there is no e-identification (compare this to Estonia, where there are no government offices, even voting is done online). I was shocked when I moved here, it was like a time machine to the 70s. But now I understand that if the services were automated, a lot of manual workers would become unemployed.
Even worse, the people deciding about automation would loose their jobs, so they always vote against it. This is setting the city back. It could be the Berlin or Stockholm of the East Coast, but chooses to be Barcelona or Warsaw: a city where things are done they way they've always been done.
Here's a view from a foreigner who has lived here for 9 months. Before that, I lived in many other cities and countries around the globe.
Here's what's positive about Toronto and its inhabitants.
- Toronto is welcoming and non-racist. New immigrants are welcomed and cheered. There are no-signs of "us vs. them" as more than half of the Torontonians are born outside of Canada. Amazing! This is the first place in the world where we felt at home from day 1.
- Toronto is warm and sunny. The summers are long and warm, the winters short and light if compared to similar countries such as those in Scandinavia and Northern Europe.
- Prices are low. Condo's and houses are very cheap compared to cities that are only 1/5 of it's size and especially to other large cities. Don't compare CAD to USD/EUR or other currencies, just calculate. Here are a few examples for 1 bedrooms:
Toronto Entertainment district: 2000 CAD/400.000 CAD
London City: 5000CAD/1.400.000 CAD
Oslo Downtown: 3500CAD/700.000 CAD
Amsterdam Canal Circle: 4000 CAD/750.000 CAD
New York Midtown Manhattan: 5000 CAD/1.000.000 CAD
- Manual labour is cheap. Services like restaurants, cabs, delivery, banks and infrastructure have not transferred to e-services, which means there is a large demand and supply for manual labour.
Here's the only downside I've seen: people lack a sense of community, vision and big dreams. The startup scene is small, and many try to build companies that bring a little revenue now and a little revenue tomorrow. People try to improve their own lives, not the lives of the entire community and city. Dreams include having a house, not becoming a billionaire. These are all part of a common theme: the fear of automation.
Companies that require years before the first dollar comes in and millions in investments could never have been started in Toronto. Imagine Skype (Sweden/Estonia), Netflix (CA), Spotify (Stockholm), Rovio (Finland), Fiverr (Israel), Criteo (France). Each of these have raised more than 30M with little or no revenue, which is unthinkable for a company in Toronto. I've asked around for the best place in Toronto to raise a 1M seed round, and the answer is unanimous: Silicon Valley.
A side effect of this is lack of technology. There is no common communication between banks (instead, there is manual labor managing checks, bank drafts, even face-to-face mortgage negotiations!), there are phone numbers instead of answers on small companies web sites, cash is still used and sometimes even preferred. Government agencies use actual papers, there is no e-identification (compare this to Estonia, where there are no government offices, even voting is done online). I was shocked when I moved here, it was like a time machine to the 70s. But now I understand that if the services were automated, a lot of manual workers would become unemployed.
Even worse, the people deciding about automation would loose their jobs, so they always vote against it. This is setting the city back. It could be the Berlin or Stockholm of the East Coast, but chooses to be Barcelona or Warsaw: a city where things are done they way they've always been done.
- Toronto is warm and sunny. The summers are long and warm, the winters short and light if compared to similar countries such as those in Scandinavia and Northern Europe.
That's very relative, but I would say that's correct only compared to northern Scandinavia in winter as a significant (and most populated) area of the region are milder than Toronto in that season.
The Laffs losing every Game 7 in the First Round of the NHL Playoffs!!!
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